Comment by Pica_soO | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Pica_soO | Hacker News Reader

Blender is simply bad UI-Design. It has nothing to do with a learning curve. I ve used alot of open source software, and the UI is usually the equivalent to english-aristocratic mansion, where every late addition is glued to the main house like a little bay window. And the first strange keyboard and control preferences (can we put a terminal in for that), will be forced down your throat. And i can handle this. Usually you find the configs and tailor them to something more adhering to common user-expectations. But then all the tutorials become useless for you. And that is where its over. I would really have loved this project to succeed. And in parts it has. There are awesome plugins for nearly everything. (Evolutionary Algos for Animation creation for example) But its completely disregard for UX-Standards have prevented it from making a industry-impact. A 3 year subscription to the max, is more expensive then it was 1990. http://forums.cgsociety.org/archive/index.php?t-182943.html That's how a self-inflicted defeat looks like.

I used to believe that Blender was bad UI design, but now I think it's quite good, albeit different approach.

Take this with a huge grain of salt, as 3d art is rarely my primary job function, but after I deliberately sat myself down and tried to approach Blender in the way it's intended, instead of getting frustrated by it not working the way wanted it to, I finally grokked it. Now I'm frustrated by other programs not working the way blender does.

I can't really say if that make it better or worse UI/UX, because I don't really get what most people think of as good UI/UX as being all that great. (e.g. why is the iOS back button on the top left of my screen, when every other directional notion is at the bottom?!?!)

Anyway, I like to think of Blender as a series of UI workflows wrapping some python scripts, workflows that don't assume that all things should be done via the MacBook Wheel :-)

Blender is not actually that bad. 3D modeling is just a hard job. You have to make a set of 2D tools that are fundamentally conflicted with the 3D work you're trying to do. You cannot realistically use Maya or 3DS Max in a professional setting without also learning a raft of keyboard shortcuts and non-standard UI.

I keep hearing this "Blender doesn't adhere to common UX standards", but nobody ever says which particular parts are the non-standard UI elements. They don't use a standard UI toolkit, but that's not the same thing as not using standard UI design. I look at it right now and I see: tabbed documents, buttons, sliders, textboxes, accordion panels, all in relatively easily recognizable formats.

You have to right-click instead of left-click to select things. Maybe that's a good thing. Maybe that initial, small, tiny road bump encourages people to look up tutorials instead of trying to forge ahead without any training.

But there are some things that are just not going to be easy. There is a reason why materials are separate than textures. The modifiers interface has actually been drastically cleaned up and things like particle emitters greatly simplified within even the last year. Where it has "non-standard UI elements", it's because there is no standard UI element to do the job. The shader node editor is quite intuitive, if you ask me.

So again, if you're going to complain about a specific thing, please cite specifics.

So save your money and put the effort into Blender. 3DS Max is not $5000 better than Blender.

Right now you can sit down in front of Maya, Houdini, or Modo and, knowing one of those packages, figure out how to navigate the UI in maybe 10 minutes. A few months ago, firing up Blender, I had to go watch some YouTube videos to figure out how the hell the UI worked.

Being different does not make it worse. You could argue that emacs ui is bad because vim user would struggle in it, or vice versa, but I think most people would agree that wouldn't make a lot of sense

If there are standard UI interactions that are used by all programs but yours, then yes, being different is worse.

For all the bad things you can say about it, IIRC the windows in Emacs (when running on X) behave like normal windows.

> If there are standard UI interactions that are used by all programs but yours, then yes, being different is worse.

I disagree. You're basically saying the current UIs are the pinnacle of UI design, just because they're popular.

Especially for software that will be used in anger day-in and day-out, it's much more important to have an efficient UI than one with discoverability or a shallow learning curve.

No, they are not. He is arguing that you throw away years of user-experience for no apparent reason. Those people don't have the luxury to retrain for a same-function-framework just because some dev can dance. They are part of a pipeline, they have work to do, and insulting them as unwilling-to-learn, is simply missing the point.

There are plenty of people who are productive using Blender, and prefer its UI. Suggesting that it should be the same as all of the other packages seems pointless. If you want software that works like all of the other packages, just use one of those.

I do. Unfortunately some tools i use, only exist in blender. So every once in a while, i have to do the dantes journey thing and venture into the ux-underworld.

I wouldnt waste so much time on this, if it werent for this wasting so much of my time.

Yes it does. Being different for no reason, makes it worse as in more work for no reason. Those commercial developers making every software they develop into another copy of office- do that for a reason.

If you do not develop something new, as in never done before, and you are innovative- you basically throw away user-experience, and they will hate you for that- and they got the right too.

If i would make a hidden C-Define into a compiler and forced you too use that, you would demand the compiler dev - of this UserInterface-UndefinedBehaviour to be hanged - but come a different audience, suddenly the standards can shift and dance.

If we are making programming analogues then I'd say this is more akin to hating LISP because it doesn't look like C.

Blender is not actually that bad.

No, Blender is not bad, it's terrible.

You need a tutorial video to understand how to close a pane, and even then it's hard. That has got nothing to do with 3D modeling being hard. It could've been a word processor and it would still be terrible.

And yes, window panes are very much a standardized UI part which has a completely non-standard interaction design in Blender. For no reason.

Edit: Before you downvote this, download Blender and try to close a pane. Just try it!

>It could've been a word processor and it would still be terrible.

Like vim or emacs?

>window panes are very much a standardized UI part which has a completely non-standard interaction design in Blender. For no reason.

It's called "tiled window management". Lots of people find it more comfortable to use than the classic overlapping windows.

> It's called "tiled window management". Lots of people find it more comfortable to use than the classic overlapping windows.

True, but when speaking about "lots", we have to keep in mind that tiled window management for the general public died together with Windows 1.0. That probably puts the percentage of the public who's ever used tiled window management around 0.001% of the total PC using population :)

> True, but when speaking about "lots", we have to keep in mind that tiled window management for the general public died together with Windows 1.0.

And came back with Windows 8 :-)

> That probably puts the percentage of the public who's ever used tiled window management around 0.001% of the total PC using population :)

Well, the awesome success of Windows 8 kind of reinforces my point :-)

But the market share of Windows 8.1 is currently 8,40%.

https://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share...

Defenders of open source, rally around the OS-outcast - for he who is condemned by the public, may he be horrible and atrocious as can be, is our brethren in spirit.

You know how bad it is, if Microsoft lowest-point is your high point.

Like vim or emacs?

Yes. There's reasons the popularity of those is waning.

It's called "tiled window management". Lots of people find it more comfortable to use than the classic overlapping windows.

It's got nothing to do with tiling. There's plenty of other software out there that's meant to be used with tiled windows. The interactions in Blender are unique to Blender, non-intuitive and non-discoverable.

> There's plenty of other software out there that's meant to be used with tiled windows.

There is a tiling window manager INSIDE blender used to control its window frames. It works pretty much like any other tiling manager. You immediately grasp the idea if you've ever used one.

I actually love how window panes work in blender. It's a bit nonstandard, but once you get the hang of it you realize how powerful it is. It makes the entire interface customizable, and I actually miss it every time I move into another application like photoshop.

I haven't used Photoshop but applications like Visual Studio allow similar configurability while still having fairly standard window controls.

I also haven't heard the same level of complaints that Blender gets about its competition. Presumably, there's solutions.

Blender's competitors are so expensive that most people haven't tried them, and of those that have, there is a significant risk of the sunk-cost fallacy tainting their opinion.

I use Blender on a regular basis. Not every day, but certainly a few times a month. Which is to say, not enough to be an expert that has the thing ingrained into my muscle memory. It's not that hard to use.

> Maybe that initial, small, tiny road bump encourages people to look up tutorials instead of trying to forge ahead without any training.

I believe this is what's called "user-hostile".

You're basically telling the user to RTFM, which is just going to drive away the creative people that you actually want to cultivate.

Newbie-hostile != user-hostile.

Hi, you seem to know blender quite well, I'm trying to export an fbx file into unity 3d, but when I import it, it's not the rendered model, it's just the solid view model, not animated... :/

I'm trying to import this simulation (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epyqHzoCxa0) without the camera view and the background image.

Thanks.

You'd probably have more luck asking this on blender stack exchange or blender artists. Here's what I found after a quick google search. It looks pretty similar to your question:

http://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/5525/animated-obj...

The fbx exporter can be tricky... Make sure you have your whole model selected before exporting and also switch from cycles rendering to Blender engine before export.

I found those two things fix missing stuff in exports of all kinds =)

Not sure why you're getting so many downvotes.

3D authoring software/tools is a funny business. Fundamentally developers aren't the primary users so they can't fully evaluate the effectiveness of their software. However unlike other domains like a web browser there aren't enough users for developers to get proper feedback about things like UI and workflow.

For the same reason that every year is supposedly the "year of linux on the desktop" you'll never see Blender/Gimp/etc unseat Max/Maya/Photoshop.

Not sure why you're getting so many downvotes.

Every post in this thread that is explaining why Blenders' UI is bad is being downvoted.

That's because there are some people who strongly disagree that it's simply "bad". If it was as simple as "Blender's UI is bad", then there wouldn't be so many people who absolutely love it ;)

Those strongly disagreeing people could post some strong arguments for where the UI is better then Max/Maya.

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